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To a Chocolate Nut Fudge Brownie Sundae
So there we were... night. It was dark. Not stormy. Not at all, in fact, it was a gorgeous night, just a bit quiet. Perhaps too quiet. You could hear a pin drop.
The reason I feel this is a comfortable assertion (without going to Spinoza-like heights of proofs and axioms) is that she kept dropping pins as we walked, the pins plink-plinking to the ground softly, but audibly.
While this made the night just properly quiet instead of too quiet it was disconcerting, her dropping the pins every few feet. For one, not that I was in my bare feet, but what if I were, or what if a kid was running along the pavement in his or her bare feet and stomped on a few of the pins -- not nice, either way. And also, I wasn't quite sure where she'd gotten all the pins from. I certainly didn't have that many new button-down shirts.
Halfway there, she'd run out, regardless, so I was able to relax a little bit, except for the night getting eerily quiet again, I almost wished she'd more pins to drop, if only to break up the quiet of the night. The thing I was fearing most, which is where eery silences hold the most capability for fear, is that the silence would be broken suddenly - by a howl, by a screech, anything. Most probably, I was thinking, by some kid screaming as they ran over some of those pins that lay scattered over the pavement behind us. Or maybe a cracking pop and a bicyclist crashing head first into a telephone pole after having punctured his or her tyre on one of the pins and then careering into the crack-making pole. Hopefully they'd be wearing a cycling helmet, that'd dull the crack and possibly help out the cyclist, as well.
No such noises came, only the occasional cricket. Okay, that's an out and out lie, I was just trying to make myself feel better. To be honest, it was dead quiet. Like in a book. One read under the covers with a torch (like a flashlight torch, not a torch with flames and such).
Streetlamps threw shadows and lights at angles you don't see light bend in the day, it gave her features and glows and highlights she didn't have in the day, as it probably did to me, though less attractively. I wish I'd a slow motion camera on my eye, as I would have been able to follow the pins as they dropped through the air between her hand and the pavement, twirling slowly, a physics experiment in perpetual motion that had gone off it's rails, the streetlamps shining off the length of the pin, where you could get a considerable amount more angels dancing than on the tip.
Some minutes after the last pin had fallen, I reached over, and caught her hand just as it entered the shadows... still soft, no more pins, indeed. There was always the chance she'd been saving one, savouring that one last pin until the silence got too unbearable.
I wasn't sure then whether I was glad she didn't have any left or not.
There, ahead by the traffic lights that stayed uniformly green, was the Tescos.
Maybe it's destiny, maybe it's luck. The chocolate nut fudge brownie sundae beckons.
disclaimer:
Thanks for the house warming present, a bhabe. Here's to the next million pound advance.
We return next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel, with the travelogue.
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